Physicist’s Fool-Proof War Formula (Just Add Media Accounts)

The military has been trying for years to turn the chaos of war into a simple math problem. So far, those efforts have been trumped by a confluence of shaky variables: free will, tribal factions and chance being a few examples. But one physicist says he’s cracked the code. How’d he do it? He turned on the TV.

Sean Gourley, a New Zealander with a background in nanoscale lasers, just finished a fellowship at Oxford, where he spent five years trying to pare war down to mathematical principles. Gourley wanted to find a consistent relationship between the size and structure of insurgency groups and the fatality of their attacks. This year, his work caught the attention of TED – the organization went so far as to credit him with discovering “the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare” – and he recently summed up several years of number crunching in a seven-minute TED-sponsored lecture.

Thank a war-fueled TV news ticker for Gourley’s epiphany. “There’s open source data here, and I thought we could grab it and use it to understand war,” Gourley tells Danger Room. For his research, Gourley collected data on the Iraq conflict from 130 different media sources, including American networks like CNN and international outlets like Al-Jazeera.

Reports in hand, Gourley and his colleagues compared the relationship between the frequency of attacks and the number of fatalities, and found a common mathematical distribution. The pattern emerged in studies of Colombia, Senegal, Afghanistan, and a handful of other modern conflicts. Same pattern, same graphical slope of 2.5. This “Alpha factor” represents the organizational structure (group size and strength) of wartime insurgencies.

With numbers crunched and graphs plotted, war became a single equation:

Probability of X people killed = C(x)^-2.5

It looks tidy, but Gourley ran into one little problem when he tried to put the formula to work: It didn’t. In his TED presentation, he admits he erred in predicting the outcome of 2007’s military surge in Iraq using his data. Gourley anticipated that the surge would push Alpha up, creating weaker, more fragmented insurgencies. It didn’t. Alpha shot down, and then stabilized to pre-2007 levels. Dr. Adam Russell, a D.C.-based social anthropologist, says this unpredictability is the root of the problem: “This Alpha factor is just observational – if it’s real at all.”

Then there are the questionable sources of Gourley’s observations. The physicist’s formula depends on press reports, to gauge how big and how deadly an insurgency is. But first reports in a warzone are notoriously sketchy. Just look at the recent airstrikes in Afghanistan’s Farah province: depending on which article you read, the body count could have been as low as 30, or as high as 125. “Media as objective facts? I don’t think so,” was Russell’s astute observation.

Gourley acknowledges that news outlets probably report less than half of wartime fatalities, but he doesn’t see a problem: a “sample” of the body count is apparently adequate, because it still represents the relationship between attack size and group dynamics. But not all conflicts see the same degree of coverage as Iraq, prompting one military insider to suggest Gourley’s methods might be better used to analyze body count reporting than to dissect insurgent strategy.

With a modern international mishmash of terrorism, pirate attacks and drone missile strikes, what kind of conflict even counts as a war? Gourley’s not sure about that either, but he points out that terrorist attacks also correspond to his Alpha figure. “Terrorism or war, ultimately, are both units of people coming together to kill,” he says. “And Alpha represents how they interact.”

And Gourley isn’t content with merely boiling down human conflict to a lone formula. He insists that by implementing his mathematical model, the military can strategically manipulate Alpha, turning insurgencies into bigger, fragmented groups or smaller, well-organized ones. Gourley’s preference? “Well, if we get these smaller, condensed groups, maybe we can sit down and talk to them.” Any volunteers?

Gourley has already tried to sell the idea on military big wigs: he presented a two-hour version of his research to forty top analysts at the Pentagon in 2007. Reactions ranged from “blow it off” skeptical to pragmatic: “they wanted to know, straight up, how they could actually use it,” he says.

Gourley admits that last question remains a work-in-progress, and military insiders doubt the model will have much impact on how the army handles conflict. (After all, there are all kinds of researchers, trying to build authoritative model of conflict.) “There are thousands of Gourley’s out there – he just got some extra exposure,” says one military observer. But if Gourley has any luck, more of his kind might soon be flooding Pentagon inboxes with their PhD dissertations: he recently launched YouNoodle.com, a website “to discover and support the hottest early-stage companies and university innovation.”